Café Leopold has reopened to customers, people and traffic already block Mumbai roads again, the Taj and the Oberoi-Trident will soon be back in business, the CST is as busy as ever. None of these diminishes in any way the sense of loss people feel for the victims of the Mumbai attack. But the first signs of a return to the quotidian mark the defeat for the current round of those that disrupt that normalcy. Sport — the greatest of open-ended narratives that consume our time, money and passion, that some ignorantly refuse to acknowledge as productive labour — is the epitome of the ordinariness, the joy and security of everyday life. For India, that representative sport is cricket. And after a hasty, fear-ridden departure, it

is only fitting that the English cricket team now return to play the two-Test series.

Kevin Pietersen’s boys have reason for their apprehensions about security; and some players may refuse to return. The England and Wales Cricket Board managing director, Hugh Morris, and Pietersen himself have spoken very encouraging words on the team’s eagerness to return. Once Reg Dickason, the ECB’s security consultant, gives the all-clear we should find ourselves in the midst of good cricket, which, this time round, will be of a high symbolic value.

The two Tests are not only important for the cricket-crazy subcontinent but they will also dispatch an immediate message to the breakers of the peace — that they will always lose their own brutal game of death. And nothing’s better equipped for that task than sport — an archetype of contest sans guns and bombs. So we wait for the English cricketers to return later this week. Even if Mumbai itself misses out on the match originally scheduled there, another Indian city will cheer for Mumbaikars.